Last Saturday, the sun shone early from an entirely blue sky and some of our neighbors had come outside to take in the delicious air. Among them was a woman I will call Martha, a neighbor who was working in her garden. I approached and greeted her by name. As soon as she heard my voice, she jumped, startled to be suddenly awakened from her reverie.

It was a moment that later provoked mutual laughter but, when it occurred, it seemed disruptive and even frightening. Martha had been shocked by an intrusion into her mental world, wresting her thoughts from another place.

Later, I wondered what had occupied her attention. Was it the plants that she was carefully placing in the ground? Perhaps she had focused on their beauty, on their creaturely life that would later flower into bloom. She may have reflected on the gift of exis-tence that they share with us, though on quite a different plane of being.

Part of this same experience could have been the feeling in her hands as she touched the dirt. Plunging one’s hands into the ground can give us a feeling of richness, of felt appreciation for the wealth that all of nature possesses.

I still remember the feeling of the earth that I experienced decades ago, when dig-ging up potatoes from a field. The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins was right even about dirt when he wrote, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” a line that always gives me inspiration.

Or maybe Martha was thinking about her mother. This past year her mother died, an event that plunged Martha and her siblings into a cycle of grief, mourning, and love. Like so many other middle-aged men and women, Martha may now think of her mother every day. The spiritual writer, Frederick Buechner, from the vantage point of seventy-three, says “My father has been dead for more than sixty years, but I doubt that  a week has gone by without my thinking of him.”

In thinking about their parents, surviving sons and daughters establish a kind of spiritual dialogue with the dead or, rather, with those living in a different sphere of existence. They are somehow present to one another and can say things that were impossible to say on earth.

Maybe, however, Martha was not thinking anything at all. She might simply have been plunged into her own soul, engaged in an altogether silent dialogue with the deepest parts of her own being. She would then have come close to a spiritual ideal, that of find-ing satisfaction of soul in just being. At times like that, it seems sufficient not to be doing anything vitally important but simply to take pleasure in sheer existence.

Of course, Martha may have been carried away by distractions. She may have been wondering, for instance, why her next-door neighbors (namely my family) do not take more loving care of our own modest front yard. Thoughts of this sort tend to waylay the prayer of even the most spiritual people.

Or, like me, she could have been absorbed by worry about another project weighing on her mind. This sort of anxiety has power enough to throw other people off course, people who are serious about the spiritual life. It is so much easier to think about the next activity rather than to concentrate on what lies at hand.

I like to think, however, that Martha knows the value in the old Latin imperative, “Age quod agis,” do what you are doing. Being able to enter deeply into the task at hand is the way to appreciate human life and the world about us. The monks who invented the slogan realized that the gap between action and contemplation could be narrowed. They discovered how to find God in all things, not just in things religious.

That insight presumably sustained them in the old days as they plowed the fields and prayed in their hearts as they do even now. “Work and pray” became their motto, a sacred slogan that helped form Western civilization.

As a result of Saturday’s encounter with Martha I have resolved not so jauntily to accost her again when she appears deep in her garden work. A person’s sacred times and sacred spaces deserve respect. Something too important may be going on to suffer easy interruption.

Richard Griffin